KAMPALA – Minister for Lands, Housing and Urban Development, Judith Nabakooba, has tasked all the stakeholders to fill the gap housing noting that Uganda has a deficit of more than 8 million housing units.
She was on Saturday afternoon commissioning a 24-apartment project in Naalya constructed by Buildnet.
She commended Buildnet as one of those companies that are defining Uganda’s real estate industry but asked it to think about building for a low-end person as well.
“I can see that through the type of the apartments and houses, you are targeting a certain high end type of customers. This is also a good business model, however, I want to encourage you to look out for solutions towards the housing needs of low income earners as well.”
“We must work together to ensure that we extend opportunities to all Ugandans regardless of their incomes to be able to have a place they can call a home,” she added.
Nabakooba noted that the Government is doing best to ensure that the Real Estate Industry thrives.
“Government has already put in place all the relevant policy and legal frameworks including the National Land Use Policy, 2009; National Land Policy, 2013; National Housing Policy, 2018; and the National Urban Policy, 2016. All these policies and laws provide a conducive environment for the industry.”
She said that they are also working hard to ensure that other vital sectors that support the real estate industry such as roads, security, access to water and power are all taken care of.
“My Ministry is also working hard to ensure that we streamline land purchase and verification processes by taking all the processes online.”
According to her, the online processes will help a lot in ironing out cases of fraud that have become rampant in the industry.
She urged the players to strengthen Self-Regulation and Management as an industry. “As a key sector, you have so many individual players like brokers, investors etc. However, majority of these are not trained and operate without any guidelines, principles, ethics etc.”
“The industry must be able to have basic professional codes of conduct,” she said.
“Members of the public must be in a position to know where to report to incase a real estate agent fails to provide the agreed upon services,” noted Minister.
Mr. Ibrahim Ssemaganda – Managing at Buildnet said that quality is what drives their construction.
“We pay attention to each detail to see that the structure that we build lasts for decades.”
Despite the current economic situation which is challenging especially when it comes to construction, Ssemaganda says that they strive to innovate ways to see that they still produce affordable housing units.
The commissioned project comprises 24 apartments, 17 of which are two bedrooms and 7 are two bedrooms.
“We are yet to hand over other two projects; Najjera heights and Revenue apartments both combined having a total of 120 apartments. We have another project under construction called Quick Site within Naalya with 44 apartments.”
